Eric Guirado's beguiling "The Grocer's Son" is deceptively simple. Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé), a 30-year-old Paris waiter, suddenly finds himself back home in the village in Provence he fled a decade earlier. His gruff, demeaning father (Daniel Duval) has suffered a heart attack, and Antoine, at least temporarily, must drive a van every day through the countryside, selling food and goods to isolated, mainly elderly customers while his good-natured mother (Jeanne Goupil) runs their small store in the village.

Gradually, the beautiful region and its inhabitants cast their spell over the moody Antoine. He is able to see beyond the crankiness of his customers and view them as resilient, humorous and capable of kindness.

Antoine just might stay, but there are life's inevitable complications. How is he going to handle his father once he's home from the hospital? And what of the beautiful neighbor in Paris (Clotilde Hesme), who has accompanied him home, with whom he is secretly in love but who is studying for exams for admission to college in Spain? Antoine may not realize it, but in trying to meet these and other challenges and decisions, he is going through a long-delayed coming of age.

A love of unspoiled countryside and its sturdy people suffuses this film, which unfolds with subtlety, humor and affection -- and becomes in the process a pure enchantment.

--

Kevin Thomas

"The Grocer's Son." MPAA rating: Unrated, with adult themes. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. At selected theaters.A lovable lug with a dirty job

Bathroom humor is such an assaultive scourge in movie comedy that it sometimes seems necessary to revive the ancient Roman law that protected bystanders from waste thrown into the streets. That's why it's so -- refreshing? -- that the Australian charmer "Kenny," about a hard-working, jovial employee for a portable toilet company, is a low-key study of underdog pride rather than a Larry the Cable Guy bodily function jokefest.

Philosophically droll about the perceived embarrassment of his trade (he knows kids aren't going to be fascinated by his work the way they're keen to hop on a firetruck on its way to a blaze), Kenny is a barrel-chested, kind-eyed Aussie king in the stand-alone outhouse business, proud of his sewage-handling capabilities -- which entail duties as varied as plumbing and protecting his latrines from vandals -- but clearly pained by being a divorced dad with a father who's never accepted him.

Shane Jacobson's committed performance reminds us of what's winning about lovable lugs, even if the mockumentary he wrote with his brother Clayton -- who also directed -- is a little thin for feature treatment.

But when you see Kenny on a date with a friendly flight attendant (Eve Von Bibra), worrying that he's talking shop too much, you know this movie's heart is in the right place and, thankfully, a good distance from the digestive system.

The fate of Lou Reed's 1973 album, "Berlin," neatly recapitulates his career in miniature. A critical and commercial failure on initial release, Reed's dour, bombastic song-suite about the lives of the drug-addicted and downtrodden steadily acquired cult cachet over the decades, peaking with its staging as a complete-album concert in 2006, which "Lou Reed's Berlin" documents.

Although it contains some of Reed's starkest and most nihilistic lyrics (which is really saying something), "Berlin's" arrangements are incongruously lush. Even in a slightly scaled-down form, the concert involves a five-piece rock band (including two bassists), strings, brass, woodwinds and a children's choir, as well as backing vocals by Sharon Jones and Antony of Antony & the Johnsons.

Reed stands at the center, taut and impassive, punching out words that are more often spoken than sung. Whether detailing a mother's forced separation from her children in "The Kids" or her subsequent suicide attempt in "The Bed," he stands apart, fulfilling the line from the show's first song: "Me, I don't care at all."

Julian Schnabel, who designed the sets as well as directed the film, tries to add warmth with cutaways to hazy Super-8 footage of a laughing Emmanuelle Seigner, playing the doomed Caroline in happier times, but there's a chilly hauteur at the movie's core that only fades during the encores, when Reed cedes the microphone to Antony for a falsetto take on "Candy Says."

If Tony Soprano had a cheekier, less haunted, openly gay British counterpart, it would be Dominic Noonan, the Manchester crime boss profiled in the stylish and compelling "A Very British Gangster." Director Donal MacIntyre, an award-winning investigative journalist, aptly calls his exposé "a movie disguised as a documentary"; it has the rhythm and look of a mainstream action film, along with a sharp soundtrack and a lead character worthy of star casting. That doesn't make the picture feel any less real but gives it a raw energy not always found in nonfiction filmmaking.

Even if MacIntyre gets his Tarantino on here with a few too-obvious flourishes, he's crafted a gutsy, startlingly personal look at not only one of Britain's most notorious gangsters -- a family-oriented sociopath with a Fagin-like entourage of dodgy young toughs and protégés -- but also a figure so trusted by his many poor, drug-and-violence-stricken neighbors that they often enlist Noonan over the police to square their social problems.

Though the locals may glorify this career criminal (he's spent more than half his life behind bars), MacIntyre never does, asking Noonan the kind of tough questions that make the director seem as confident as his brazen subject.